I’m never sure, when selecting a topic to blog about, how basic is “too basic”. I felt a bit silly mentioning this topic in a training workshop I offered last week, as it is truly one of the fundamental fundamentals. Then I had a professor (not from the workshop) email me today, who confessed that they had just made this mistake…

When you log into Blackboard, you are prompted for a username and password. Your username is not going to be something private; at Palomar the faculty just use their first initial and last name in almost every case. Your password, however, is private.

Do not tell anyone what your password is.

College employees will never ask you for your password. We don’t need it, have no right to be told it, and it is a violation of the Telecommunications Use policy at Palomar to tell it to someone else. This moribund on sharing your password includes: in person, on the phone, through email, as part of a support ticket, writing it on a post-it and leaving it stuck to a tech’s keyboard, writing it on the whiteboard before your online class orientation, telling it to the students who want to add your class for them to use until they are officially enrolled, and yelling it across a crowded student-use computer lab for someone on the phone with tech support to relay to the tech.

I truly wish I was making up ANY of those scenarios, but I have seen them all happen.

The negative results I’ve seen from these behaviors range from “someone locked me out of my account”, through “someone wiped out all my email”, right up to “someone bulk deleted all the content, including grades, from all of my Blackboard courses.” Mind you, that’s not the worst case scenarios, such as someone wrongfully submitting final grades or (if you’re the type to use the same password in multiple places) someone gaining access to financial information. The ones I listed above are, again, just the ones I have seen happen.

So, I’m not going to bother telling you to change your password regularly, nor am I going to tell you to use an extra-esoteric password with special characters avoiding anything that is in the dictionary. I will urge you, though, to not give out your password.